Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Friday May 16, 2008 @11:37AM
from the deep-zen-like-discussions-about-games-i'm-sure dept.

Disney has apparently launched "DGamer", a service designed to allow Nintendo DS users to create online profiles, track accomplishments, and connect with other users. First announced back in February, most every Disney game going forward will be completely integrated. "'DGamer was built around the vision to connect Disney video game fans in a secure, fun environment and it is truly the first integrated online community of its kind to do so on multiple platforms,' said Graham Hopper, executive vice president and general manager for Disney Interactive Studios. 'We recognize the importance of delivering unique experiences to our consumers and how crucial it is for parents to feel confident that the community is secure for their kids.'"

Anyone remember Aladdin for the Sega Genesis (not that crappy Super Nintendo version where you couldn't even use a sword)? That game was pretty awesome. Actually, most Disney games that I played were pretty good. There was even one for the NES where you walked around Disney Land and the levels were various rides. One was a Space Mountain level which I remember being fun.There were some obnoxious Disney games, like the Lion King, and I haven't played any of their recent games, but back in day, they were

Disney licenses were used for a few classics back in the day. DuckTales and Chip and Dale Resuce Rangers come to mind. As for more recently Kingdom Hearts has been mentioned as well, but Spectrobes is another game I wish I had more time to spend on, and amazingly, it's by Disney.

RTFA:Disney will have "3 levels of chat available". I'm betting the most common one used will be "speed chat" where you can only pick words from a predefined (by Disney)list.

The true freeform chat that a predator would need also requires considerable hoops be jumped through in order to use it - and then only with others who have jumped through those hoops back in the big blue room.

So, predators will have a pretty rough time of it - not impossible, but pretty darn difficult. Of course, it will be even rough

Nintendo has gone to amazing lengths to avoid having anything that even resembles names on any of their games. All the Wii games have anonymous players, with chat functionality purposefully removed. You can't even add people by name, you need a 15 something digit randomized ID to add a friend to your system.

I'm surprised that this was allowed at all. Maybe its because Disney will take the blame from parents the first time a child-stalker story hits CNN?

Remember that Disney ran Virtual Magic Kingdom for quite some time, and closed it down recently, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was because they were basically moving it to this new DS platform. If Nintendo for some reason lets them bypass the friend code thing and have something vaguely resembling an online chatroom, it's because Disney used VMK to make a very impressive case to Nintendo to circumvent the rules--keeping in mind that S-E was denied when they wanted to port Final Fantasy XI to the Wii, this is the only way it could be explained if DGamer allows communication with strangers.

The reason for this being that with VMK Disney went out of their way to control chat activity. I only played it very briefly and mostly at Disneyland park, but the most striking feature was that yes you could chat with random Disneyholics connected to the service, but you could only use pre-approved dictionary words to do so. It seemed robust enough to keep from being excessively limiting (unlike the auto-translate feature of the aforementioned Final Fantasy XI which was more useful for being entertaining and saying naughty things--I played for months before I knew the FFXI dictionary well enough to be able to even use it effectively) but I was led to assume that using it to say anything personally identifiable was excessively tricky.

So if Nintendo greenlights this with the inclusion of chat with strangers, it's going to be because Disney proved that they made VMK safe when their users had full keyboards, and that on the DS they're going to tighten it even more, and that they will have employees constantly monitoring communication to make sure it is safe.

What Yvan said. They would have just made an FFXI external hard drive. Why this wasn't an option on the PS2 with its USB who knows, maybe the ports were slower I don't remember. But FFXI with all the current expansions and a 20GB+ (the current version with all expansions is about 10GB and there are still more in the works) external USB hard drive for like $90 wouldn't have sold too shabby. Put a longish cord on it with a USB port for a keyboard (you pretty much need one to play XI) to make couch play easier